Charles Brokaw - The Lucifer Code

Two shots rang out in quick succession. Humboldt jerked, then stumbled back. He turned round and clutched at his face, but blood already poured from one of the shattered lenses of his mask.

Eckart cursed. For a home-grown terrorist, the woman was good.

Humboldt staggered twice more, then turned boneless and dropped to the ground. His head rebounded from the floor and Eckart knew the man was dead.

‘Are you sure there’s no other way out of the office?’ Eckart demanded.

‘No, sir,’ Mayfield replied over the com. ‘Two elevators. The stairs at each end of the building. That covers everything.’

Eckart tried to put himself inside the office and work out what he would do if he was trapped in there. You wouldn’t have been trapped in there, he told himself.

‘What about the windows?’

‘The grenade blew the glass out of the one in the office, sir, but the people inside haven’t left.’

‘Can you see inside?’

‘No, sir. The smoke’s too thick.’

‘Keep watch.’ Eckart kept his eyes on the door. ‘How much time has elapsed since the first shots?’

‘Two minutes thirty-seven seconds, sir. We’re coming up on the threshold for this mission.’

Eckart knew they couldn’t stay much longer. The local police would arrive shortly, and the college security armed-response teams had to be en route as well. If they didn’t leave soon, things were going to get messier. He willed himself to be patient. Whatever threat Lourds presented against the United States was about to end. Eckart fully intended to take the professor into custody.

Or kill him.

‘Sevki?’ Cleena cupped a hand over her ear and struggled to hear him at the other end of the earwig connection. ‘I can’t hear. A grenade deafened me.’

‘… other wall – elevator shaft – emergency.’ Sevki sounded as though he was breaking up as he shouted, and she could still barely hear him. But she understood what he was talking about. They’d managed something like this before.

Approaching the wall on the other side of the office, Cleena bent down and took her knife out of her boot. When she reached the wall, she fisted the hilt and drove the broad blade into the Sheetrock. The material gave way easily. Two strokes made an X. She stepped back and drove her boot through it. Big pieces of the material dropped to the floor but others vanished in the space beyond. In seconds, she’d stripped the Sheetrock away to reveal the 2 x 4 studs beneath. She used the knife again to score the wall on the other side. When she kicked this time, her foot went through it.

‘… you see – it there?’ Sevki asked. ‘Cleena – you – now?’

Cleena shoved Sheetrock out of the way and peered into the empty space. Darkness filled the area on the other side of the broken wall, but the light that filtered in around her exposed a greasy network of cables.

‘I’ve found the elevator shaft,’ she said.

She checked the wall studs again and hoped Lourds could squeeze through. If anything, it would be the professor’s big head that got him stuck. She almost smiled at that, but the thought of the men waiting out in the hallway with guns took the fun out of that possibility. The elevator sat at the first floor. When the fire alarm had been set off, the cages had all automatically gone to the ground floor.

She pulled her head back out and addressed Lourds and Olympia. ‘Elevator shaft. We can use it to get downstairs.’ This time she could hear herself a little.

Lourds nodded, then picked up a leg from the broken table that had held the miniature war pieces. He swung it experimentally, then went to work on the Sheetrock still barring the door.

Cleena had to admit that once the professor decided on a course of action, not much deterred him. When he was satisfied, he reached into his backpack and took out a mini-flashlight. The fact that he seemed to be prepared for everything except being kidnapped irked Cleena. But it was probably more because she hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight herself.

‘The elevator cage is downstairs,’ he said. ‘We can’t get through.’

‘We go to the second floor,’ Cleena said. ‘Then to the stairs.’

‘They’ve got to have men outside,’ Lourds told her.

Cleena nodded. ‘They do. We’ll have to get round them.’

‘No,’ Olympia said. ‘We go downstairs. To the basement. There are tunnels that connect this building to other buildings on the campus.’

‘Sevki?’ Cleena asked.

‘It’s true,’ Sevki said. He sounded tinny and far away. ‘There’s an infrastructure throughout the college. The maintenance people use the tunnels to move large pieces of equipment and check on the utilities.’

‘All right.’ Cleena gestured to Olympia. ‘You know the way.’

Olympia peered through the hole, then back at Cleena. ‘You expect me to jump?’

‘I’ll go first,’ Lourds volunteered. He took off his backpack and handed it to Olympia. ‘That way I can help you down.’ He shone the flashlight round, then put it in his mouth and eased down into the shaft. Tension wound Cleena almost to the breaking point. Images of the scar-faced man and others like him kept bouncing through her mind. The effects of the pepper gas had made her eyes and nose run and she knew she couldn’t rely on her damaged hearing to hear anyone approaching.

When he was below, thankfully without breaking his neck, Lourds talked Olympia into descending, guiding her feet with his hands. Cleena followed at her heels in case they decided to bolt and attempt to get away from her.

‘Sir, we’re about to enter the red zone on our time line,’ Mayfield stated calmly.

‘I know. Everyone outside be prepared to exfiltrate instantly. There should be confusion enough on the campus to cover some of our retreat.’ Eckart didn’t like giving those orders. It was too near admitting failure, and he wasn’t prepared to do that yet. ‘Let me know when the police are on site.’

‘Affirmative.’

Too much time had elapsed for Lourds and the women to emerge from the office. If they hadn’t come out by now, they’d either been overcome by the gas – or they’d found another way out.

He took a fresh grip on his pistol and stepped forward in a combat crouch. He wore Kevlar under his shirt, but his head was unprotected. He reached the door, took a breath to steady himself, then ripped away his gas mask to clear his vision. The gas stung his eyes, but he’d been exposed to it on close-quarter battlefields numerous times. Whipping around the doorframe, he dropped to his knees with the pistol gripped in both hands before him.

No one was inside the room. It took him a moment to spot the hole in the wall through all the lingering gas. He slipped his gas mask up from his neck and back over his face.

‘They’re not inside,’ Eckart growled. He coughed as vestiges of the gas raked through his lungs.

‘There’s no other way out.’

‘They found one. It looks like a door.’

‘It was a door. Evidently it had been sealed off some time in the past.’

‘Where does it lead?’

‘To the adjoining office. If you’ve got that office door covered, then you’re covering the office next door as well.’

Eckart looked down the hall and saw the office was next to the elevator.

‘They can’t get out of there,’ Mayfield said.

‘They couldn’t get out of the last room they were in.’ Eckart swung back to the doorway and fired a half-dozen rounds into the hole in the wall.

There was no response.

A bad feeling ripped through Eckart’s stomach as he gazed back at the elevator next to the other office. The woman was a street rat. She was clever and dangerous.

‘Open the elevator doors,’ Eckart ordered. ‘Check the shaft.’ As his men ran to do that, he ducked into the office and crossed over to the hole in the wall. The door lay inside the room, torn from its hinges. He cursed as he scanned the room over his pistol sights and saw no one.